The first decade of observation was an exercise in frustration.
Nicholas had expected revelation. He had expected the seeds he had planted—those thousands of fragments embedded in creatures across the Eastern lands—to open windows into a world of wonders, to reveal the hidden machinery of a divine order that had existed for millennia beyond his sight. He had expected to see cultivators meditating on mountain peaks, immortals walking among mortals, the great celestial bureaucracy that Odin had described operating in plain sight.
Instead, he found... nothing.
For ten years, his animal avatars lived and died, their senses reporting only the mundane. The great eagle in the Himalayas soared over peaks that were certainly majestic, certainly ancient, certainly filled with the weight of ages—but there was nothing there. No temples hidden in the clouds. No cultivators meditating in caves. No immortals walking paths that mortals could not see. Only rock and snow and wind, beautiful and empty.
The dragonfly over the Yellow River traced its brief, buzzing arc across waters that had witnessed the birth of civilization. It saw cities rise and thrive, farmers tending their fields, merchants plying their trade. It saw shrines to gods that Nicholas recognized from ancient texts—the Jade Emperor, the Queen Mother of the West, the Three Pure Ones—but they were only shrines. Stone and wood and faded paint. The prayers offered before them rose into the air like smoke, and then simply... stopped. They did not reach any divine ear. They did not empower any celestial being. They simply vanished, their faith energy disappearing into a void that Nicholas's weakened fragment-senses could not penetrate. It was as if the prayers were being siphoned away, pulled into another dimension entirely, hidden behind a barrier that his scattered, fragmented awareness could not cross.
The woman in Sichuan lived her life, bore her children, and through her bloodline the fragment passed. Her descendants were farmers, merchants, teachers, clerks. They went to shrines, offered prayers, celebrated festivals—but they never saw anything beyond the ordinary. They never encountered a cultivator. They never witnessed a miracle. They never felt the presence of anything that could not be explained by the natural world. And the prayers they offered, like all the others, simply disappeared into the void.
Nicholas began to wonder if Odin had misled him. If the Eastern immortals were not hiding in plain sight, but had simply... faded. If the great celestial hierarchy, conferred in blood and fire after the shattering of the world, had crumbled over the millennia into dust and memory.
But then the fragments began to find the deep places.
A wolf, carrying one of his seeds, ventured into a forest in the mountains of Hokkaido. The trees there were old—older than any Nicholas had seen in the West, their roots sinking into soil that had never known a plow, their branches forming a canopy so dense that sunlight was a rumor. And in the heart of that forest, the wolf found something.
A pool of water, still as glass, reflecting a sky that was not quite the sky above it. And in that pool, something moved.
The wolf crept closer, its senses—Nicholas's senses—straining to understand what it was seeing. The creature in the pool was the size of a small house, its scales the color of jade, its eyes the color of gold. It had no shape that Nicholas could name—not quite a serpent, not quite a fish, not quite anything that belonged to the natural world. But it was there, impossibly, undeniably, resting in the depths of a pool that should not exist in a forest that should not contain it.
The wolf watched for three days. On the fourth, the creature rose from the pool, its massive form dripping water that seemed to glow with its own light. It moved through the forest with a grace that belied its size, and as it moved, the air around it shimmered. Nicholas felt it then—a presence, a pressure, a power that was entirely unlike anything he had encountered in the West. It was Qi. Raw, potent, alive. The creature breathed it in with every motion, absorbed it through every scale, was sustained by it in ways that Nicholas could only begin to understand.
A spirit beast. A descendant of the monsters born from dark faith, its ancestors shaped by human belief and suffering during the wars that had shattered the world. But unlike the monsters of the West, which faded without constant worship, this creature had adapted. It had inherited the authority of its parents, that fragment of divine essence that had been passed down through generations of chaotic birth and death. And it had learned, through instinct older than memory, to cultivate. To draw Qi from the world around it, to strengthen its body and its soul, to grow beyond the limitations that had been imposed on it at its birth.
Over the following years, the fragments that had embedded themselves in animals across the East began to find more of these places. A fox discovered a mountain cave in Shandong where the very stones seemed to hum with Qi, and within it, a serpent with scales of silver that could command the weather. A crane found a lake in the highlands of Yunnan where the water was so thick with Qi that it glowed at night, and beneath its surface, a tortoise whose shell was inscribed with characters older than any written language. A rat that had burrowed deep beneath the streets of Xi'an found a cavern where the roots of the mountains twisted together, and coiled among them, a creature that was half-dragon and half-serpent, its eyes burning with a light that had not been seen since before the great battle.
Spirit beasts of every shape and size, each one infused with Qi, each one possessing powers that seemed almost random in their distribution. They did not build civilizations or create societies. They simply... existed, in the spaces that humanity had abandoned, living lives that spanned centuries, cultivating in the slow, patient way of beings that had no need for hurry.
But of human cultivators—of the disciples who had been conferred as the three hundred and sixty-five grand gods, of the immortals who had achieved the Yang Spirit, of the vast celestial bureaucracy that Odin had described—there was no sign. The shrines remained empty. The prayers remained unanswered, their faith energy vanishing into a void that Nicholas's fragment-senses could not pierce. It was as if the entire Eastern divine order existed in a dimension parallel to the mortal world, accessible only through channels that his scattered avatars could not follow.
He was beginning to suspect that the East had retreated entirely. That the great beings who had shattered the world, who had sealed their mad brothers, who had conferred the celestial hierarchy, had simply... withdrawn. Into realms that no mortal—and no fragment of a Western god—could reach.
Then a child died.
He was the son of a woman in Shanghai, the latest vessel in a bloodline that had carried one of Nicholas's fragments for the entire decade of observation. He was ten years old, playing in the street when a car lost control and struck him. The body was broken, the life extinguished.
Nicholas saw his opportunity.
He could not trace the prayers that vanished into the void each day. He could not perceive the channels that carried faith to whatever beings waited beyond his sight. But a soul—a soul was different. A soul was something he could touch, could cling to, could hide within. And this soul, this dying boy's soul, was about to travel exactly where Nicholas needed to go.
He reached out through the fragment embedded in the boy's bloodline, the fragment that now resided in the fading consciousness of the child's departing spirit. He did not try to control it. He did not try to guide it. He simply... attached himself. He wove the fragment deep into the boy's soul, hiding it in the spaces between memories, in the cracks where no one would think or be able to look. He made himself small, smaller than a thought, smaller than a whisper, a passenger waiting for the journey to begin.
The boy's soul rose from his broken body. It hovered for a moment, confused, directionless—and then it was pulled.
Nicholas felt the tug. It was not violent, not forceful, but it was absolute. The soul was being drawn toward something, pulled along a channel that had been carved into the fabric of reality by forces older and more patient than anything he had encountered. He clung to the boy's consciousness, a stowaway on a journey he could not make alone, and let himself be pulled.
The channel was dark. Not the darkness of a moonless night, but the darkness of a place where light had never existed, where the concept of illumination had no meaning. Nicholas could feel the walls of the passage around him, if they could be called walls—they were not stone or flesh or anything he had ever encountered. They were... boundaries. Edges. The shape of a path that had been worn smooth by countless souls, each one following the same trajectory, each one drawn toward the same destination.
He could feel the others, too. Not the boy—the boy was fading, his consciousness dissolving into something simpler, something that did not need to think or remember or be. But there were other souls, thousands of them, millions of them, streaming through the channel alongside him. Some were bright, some were dim, some were so faded that they were barely more than shadows. But they all moved the same direction. They all followed the same pull.
The journey lasted a lifetime. Or a moment. Nicholas could not tell. Time had no meaning here, in this place between places, this passage between worlds. He simply held on, clinging to the boy's fading soul, waiting for whatever came next.
And then, there was light.
It was not the light of the sun, not the light of the Atrium, not any light Nicholas had ever seen. It was soft and golden and endless, pouring through the end of the channel like water through a broken dam. The boy's soul drifted toward it, drawn by forces that Nicholas could not resist, could not understand, could not even name.
He held on.
The light enveloped them. The channel fell away. The darkness vanished. And Nicholas, hidden in the soul of a dead child, found himself somewhere else entirely.
He opened his fragment-senses, not knowing what to expect, he thought that he would see something familiar, something that fit the patterns of the other afterlives.
What he saw instead—
To be continued...
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